Ask HN: Developer burnout – how to rediscover the passion, or new career?
I've been developing software for the last 15 years and I've stopped 3 months ago and just quit. It wasn't the job, it was one of the better companies I've worked for, the people were nice, the tech was cool and the money was great. Outside of work my life is pretty fulfilled, my first child was born last year, and although its been hard its also really awesome.
I've just lost the passion for developing software :(
I've taken 3 months off so far, but still can't bring myself to open up some code - I'm wondering now if I should think about changing career completely, what can an ex-developer retrain into?
82 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadOr if you like to travel frequently, look at becoming a sales engineer.
Or do consulting, become self employed, start a company, etc.
Lots of options, but you have to find something that inspires you. Take another few months off if you can afford it, travel around, get involved in things that interest you in and out of the industry, engage in hobbies, eventually something will strike your fancy.
1) after talking to my wife and my doctor I got a counselor. Well really a team of mental health professionals. My counselor and a psychiatrist to help with meds really helped. I started out by taking some medication and doing weekly one on one therapy. Over time I actually got off of medication and the therapy reduced to every other week and then monthly. I still see my counselor every month. He’s amazing. I am so glad I sucked up my pride and met and talked to him.
2) through therapy I realized that I didn’t have an identity outside of being a software developer. That’s what was burning me out. I wasn’t Tim the person who has a family and interests and develops software. I was Tim: software developer. The end. This turns out to be really bad. I had to remember who I am other than software developer. All I ever did was work or think about work or work on other things that were just like work.
3) in discovering who I am I remembered my other passions in life. I spent more time with my family and enjoy the time more. I spend a little time with just myself and that is ok too. I enjoy hobbies (mine are recreational math, reading legal briefings (I’m aware this is weird), crocheting, and writing short stories). I do these by myself or with my kids and wife. It’s nice.
4) now when I sit down to code it’s deliberate and I don’t feel passion towards it as much. I'm okay with that. Coding is work and pays bills and makes me happy in that way. And when I’m done with it for today I’m ok with that too.
Ironically enough I’m more successful in coding and business than I have been in many many years. It’s great. It hasn’t harmed me at all.
So I would suggest not giving up on coding. It pays the bills well and it’s a good career. I’d suggest going to talking to a professional. Figure out what the underlying issues are and fix those.
I’d be glad to answer any questions you have.
I assume it's because there is a bias on technology-focused communities such as HN. The bias of solving problems with technologies (be it languages, books, life hacks, ...), even if the problems are of a social or psychological nature.
You can't solve all problems with technology.
Yet somehow we think we should be able to work out personal issues (burnout, marriage issues, depression, etc) by ourselves. It's bizarre.
If you can afford help, get it. If you can't, often you can get a discount (sliding scale) or work something out.
... Like if it was a superpower.
Superheroes doesn't need advice. At least in the comics I read as a kid.
So this superhero syndrome, hurts more than having no superpower at all.
What are you talking about?
If you're able to understand or at least start troubleshooting computer relates stuff, you look like you hace a superpower to them.
0. http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/134
Edit to add: The therapist I have in mind is a former engineer and engineering manager, and works almost exclusively with engineers and their spouses/families.
I feel like this is exactly my problem at the moment - how did you solve it?
1) You find your job fulfilling, inspirational unto itself, or...
2) Your job enables you to enjoy other things.
Ideally you want friends and a hobby (and ideally friends who share the same hobby) -- a hobby that happens to not be primarily software.
If you don't know where to start, maybe look for a list of active meetups in the area.
Mindfulness helps with this so much. And very quickly problems started to go away and I felt so much better. I became significantly more productive. I was having fun. I felt relaxed. I felt confident. I’m absolutely amazing.
It wasn’t very easy and it wasn’t a fun process at all. But I am so glad I did it.
On the other hand, I live in a country with high unemployment rate, people barely have enough to get by day to day. A friend complained to me recently that he did not get paid for 2 months (he works in the public health sector). Compared to him, I’m living a dream. But I feel misserable.
It's very counterproductive and stops many from doing something that has the potential to completely turn things around.
I had no idea what it would be like. I was honestly scared to death to see someone. I was a fool. Rich, my counselor, is a kind, intelligent, and friendly man. I said “what are we doing?” And he said “you’re paying me by the hour to be your best friend. Just let me help guide you into a happy relationship.” He did. I complained. I cried. I got mad. We laughed our asses off. And honestly it helped. He made me feel like I was normal for my feelings. He let me know when I was wrong and how to rethink things. He let me vent. He smacked me emotionally. It is fantastic. It helped almost immediately.
I also can’t seem to stop thinking about work. Maybe it’s related to that point. I can’t enjoy anything since there is always “but you should be solving problem X” in the back of my mind. Maybe it’s the type of personality I have - if there is a problem, I can’t stop ruminating about it. It’s mostly work related since that’s why I do 95% of the time, but other problems too, especially when dealing with people.
I know I am not adding any value to the discussion - just wanted to thank you for your insights and to the person that asked the question.
It also has helped my mental toughness - if I have a bad day (or week, month, year) at work, I still have other things to fall back on, things that bring me joy and help define who I am as a person. Before, if something went wrong at work, it crushed me. Now I have more perspective, and work issues don't have as much weight as they used to.
Only took me a few decades to figure it out! Hope yours works out more quickly.
Here's their reality:
1. It's all top priority. 2. It all needs to be done yesterday.
:)
No wonder we get stressed!
But, if you want to keep it close, you can do analytic or managemnt work. Analysts with development bacground have advantage.
Or maybe don't code yet, just read about theory - math, engineering, organization and soft skills for a bit. Maybe you will start to get feel for coding after you do related but different activities for a while.
I'm currently in a phase where I still get satisfaction from design and coding but the things I have to work on right now just aren't that interesting.
I'm not feeling a high from my current work. It seems trivial, boring, reducing tech debt that I just don't find interesting at this point in my career.
The dopamine release isn't there and my previous work was giving that to me daily in large quantities.
I'm considering changing teams.
At some level though, I am in the same boat as you. I don't want to just write lines of code. I want a bit more.
Since this started happening, I've enrolled in courses on Coursera and Khan Academy. I'm leaning about deep neural networks and machine learning. The amount of information is staggering.
I have one stream on just relearning or newly learning some of the math. I have another stream just watching ML and neural net tutorials and articles to become as familiar as I can. Then, there's a third stream of actually coding through some exercises.
Motivation comes and goes. Stay disciplined and find something that really excites you.
If you're just done with development, maybe consider a step into management.
Most new parents seem to be perpetually short of sleep and exhausted for the first two years. Being exhausted can make intellectually challenging things just too hard to cope with.
I will suggest that it is possible you are just tired and should consider finding employment that is less mentally taxing for now. Consider the possibility that when things settle down, you may want to go back to coding.
So: get plenty of sleep (a golden rule is when the child sleeps the parent should also sleep), then invest in some topic that's not in your comfort zone (e.g. working on CRUDs? Learn embedded programming with Rust).
Yes, this.
I'm currently learning electronics, with the Arduino environment, and I think I never had so much fun with programming since the days I learned to do some ActionScript 2.0 with Flash MX, back in the days. Not a very glamorous example, but I genuinely enjoyed the simple fact of programmatically moving stuff on the screen. Now, with Arduino, I get to programmatically move things in the physical world.
Pure fun.
Silly things, but had a fun time doing that, and got motivated to code again :)
Well... that gets quite different when you do it in a professional context. I'd say there is more pressure than in pure software development.
1. The deadlines are harder. You cannot really ship a half-baked product and tell yourself you'll ship an update every week after. This is of course even more true if you are on the hardware side.
2. The pressure is higher. Because of point 1, you have more pressure to get things right on the first launch. You also have to deal with the intertwined timeline of the hardware design and manufacturing. And the money involved is arguably higher, so a failure can represent a big hit for the company.
3. The final product is a bit more likely to have a real use. That gives a better sense of purpose, but it can come with a greater moral responsibility (it depends on individuals, of course). You may not carry the same weight for the Nth rewrite of a random advertising webapp and for a critical safety related device (to take extreme examples).
And now after you've overcome all this, you get thanked by being paid half what the advertising software developers get ;-)
> Well... that gets quite different when you do it in a professional context.
Isn't this true with everything? That's why it's important to have something that is not related to work and by extension you can play around with it without the pressure of doing it "professionally".
Actually, that's what I think leads to burn out: no time to play around with stuff without pressure of "doing it one true way" or with "business value".
That isn't to say there isn't something else going on (seeing a professional counselor/therapist is never a bad idea!), but seems entirely reasonable that this is a contributing factor. And the good news is, this part gets better!
I do think though if you are significantly burnt out then a year off might be necessary in order to fully recover.
Some of us are leopards who cannot change their spot...
In the meanwhile, try other things. Do you have hobbies? If no, did you have any when you were a child? Or just experiment with new stuff.
Or perhaps try finding a place where your computer skills will be useful, but you wouldn't be doing the classical kind of development. For example, you could help some people in their work by creating a spreadsheet with automatically calculated results. Or try writing documentation for open-source software. Teach kids programming or using the computer.
Without knowing more about you I can't give a better advice. But the main message is that after 15 years of doing something, 3 months of break do not mean anything. Especially if you spent them taking care about a small child; that is not the same as having a break fully for yourself.
Also agree with your advice to do other things. Simply walking for an hour in the fresh air is vastly underrated in these days of back-to-back ultra-marathons.
How do you find code you want to write?
If you have a day job and need an escape, then don't bother with making it robust, polished and feature complete - just have fun doing it regardless of what the world may think of it, only thing that matters is what you think and what you get out of it.
If you don't have a day job and your next project is going to be your source of income, then I think my original statement applies.
What many do is turn the fun side project into a day job by focusing all their attention on it once they see potential in it and then start polishing, making it robust and feature complete.
If you find something that just captures your imagination then go with the flow.
By coincidence it was a video linked to here on HackerNews that gave me the impetus for the tech project on my last career break. It was the video of the guy who fixed a ten year old bug in Guitar Hero without the source code. It turned out to be a memory allocation failure. I found that so interesting I spent quite a bit of my 6 month career break investigating memory allocators, memory debug tools, and even wrote a couple of my own experimental allocators - absolutely fascinating stuff. Really miss those days!
Organisations of differing sizes benefit in a huge way (and pay for the privilege) to hear stories, “war” or not, relating to their current problem set, and the various ways those problems can be solved, from an experiential aspect. Just to hear the various woes you faced and how you tackled them, is valuable to upstarts in the field.
Aside from being cathartic to anonymise and relay your experience, you could possibly help an organisation focus or see what they’re doing right, or wrong, in their current initiative.
Your 15 years of stories are something new companies almost _need_ to hear.
I still love writing code. Now I just build stuff for myself.
If you're suffering from a real burnout, you need to seek professional help.
If the latter, do some self reflection and figure out what it is that truly interests you and see if you can change your life in ways that would allow you to do more of that.
Do explore a bit. Play with your baby. Pick up some hobbies. Particularly creative ones. Make music, art, sing, dance, act, etc.
Re "my first child was born in the past year"... If you're like any other new parent I know, you've been running on fumes, and I lose all ability to produce code when I don't sleep.
You don't need passion to be a successful, productive, professional developer. many have it (and many of those passionate people drive me batshit crazy with their protecting their passion and making software-crafting an intolerable place to be).
For me, I've burned out of it several times. One of the things that brought me back was realizing "the tools suck, and whenever I'm doing something else, I end up drawn back in by the need for better tools".
Writing code isn't the end. I don't particularly enjoy the act writing code. But I really hate working with crappy tools. And while writing code isn't particularly fun, it helps me deal with other shit. It's a damn powerful skill to have, even if the major output isn't "software".
As to what you can retrain into? Anything you want. Find out what matters to you, though, then figure out how to get there. One of the great things about being a developer is you can usually make enough cash happen in such a way that you can find a path anywhere you want to be.
I got myself fired at least once before I realized that what I'm passionate about in programming is not the thing that pays the bills.
My point being: It's a job. You receive money for doing it because it's either hard or impossible for your employer to do it themselves. Most of the time there's really nothing to be passionate about here.
It's enough that you're in the 1% of people who made an effort to learn all this. The vast majority of the population consider our line of work to be immensely boring - so much so that even our relatively high salaries don't attract them that much.
Cold professionalism and tinkering after-hours[1] are the things that I would recommend.
[1] That is - once you'll have the time and energy for that. Currently, you clearly don't.
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I quit software a few times.
The first was because of low income. I started a cafe. But someone offered me about 5x the money I was making to get back in, and I did.
The second time I was a freelancer. I kept building all these shitty apps that nobody used, that were backed by bad teams and didn't make any money. So I started my own startup to do something worthwhile.
The third one was after I sold my startup. It was doing okay, at 5% weekly growth. But I was tired of people in the "startup community". I was working 100+ hour weeks. I couldn't get any funding even with significant traction, while some fools got lots of funding without even a product. I felt like a failure as a CEO, sold the company and retired for about a year.
Resting did nothing at all to cure burnout. What really helped was when someone asked me to go around the country, training teachers and students in advanced programming techniques.
It was giving back that really helped me out of burnout. If you've been in the industry for a long time, mentoring helps a lot.
After meeting many successful tech startup founders I realized, they retired before having their first serious burnout.
It's so important to remember that "programming" is a skill roughly equivalent to "writing". It's not one specific "thing", but a generalized tool for solving problems in life. There are styles and domains of programming that would feel like almost a completely different occupation from each other.